Joan Harris Centre for Gifted & Talented

The Joan Harris Centre is the most popular dance studio in the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania area. Students of the dance studio come from all across Northeastern Pennsylvania, including Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Hazelton, Dallas, Tunkhannock, Kingston, Pittston, The Poconos, Nanticoke, and Hanover, just to name a few cities. The dancers at the school travel from five counties, including, Luzerne County, Lackawanna County, Monroe County, Wyoming County and Carbon County to study at the centre's campus centrally located in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Offering dance classes in Ballet, Tap, Jazz, Modern and Hip Hop, the dance studio offers the most accelerated program in NEPA and boasts all professional adult instructors.

The Joan Harris Centre is the only dance studio in the Wilkes-Barre Area to stage five full school productions a year. Each October, the school stages its annual Halloween Spooktacular and in December a Holiday Extravaganza. The spring features a full length ballet starring all of the ballet students of the school. Some of the ballets the centre has staged include, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Don Quixote, La Fille Mal Gardee and the original work, Corciev. The school year concludes with three professional productions at the F.M. Kirby Center, the premiere theater in Northeast PA. The Joan Harris Centre even has a special summer session which concludes with shows and a picnic at Knoebels Amusement Resort.

We look forward to you joining our family. Each and everyone of our students is dear to us, they are like our sisters, our brothers and our children. We strive to be for our dancers an extension of their family. We provide them with adult mentors in the form of our teaching staff. We give the children structured activities designed to help hem learn and grow. We nurture them be teaching the students how to take care of their bodies and keeping them involved in a well defined physical fitness program. We five them an effective education that allows the children to develop skills and achieve goals. Finally, we help the children acquire a sense of civic responsibility through community shows and our on-going charitable programs.

It has always been our intention to make the students feel welcome and comfortable at the school, just as they would at home, while at the same time giving them an appreciation for the aesthetics and the fundamental resources that are necessary for children to lead a successful life. In fact, our whole program at the Centre is designed not only to train a dancer in the best possible way, but also to aid in the growth of a child into a well rounded and gifted individual. We take all these principles and package them in a recreational form, a way for the children to enjoy themselves while they are learning.

Recent News

We are proud to announce that once again the Joan Harris Centre was chosen as the host studio for the Wilkes-Barre cast auditions of the Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker. Additionally our own Miss Elisabeth as been contracted to train … Continue reading →

A Synopsis of the Ballet Prologue: A long, long time ago in a land far away from here, there was a beautiful forest. In those days it had been a sunny place where fruit trees and scented wood rooted through … Continue reading →